


Lips Sealed

by The_Asset6



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, GW2020, Gallavich Week 2020, M/M, S4 Setting, Shameless-Typical Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25403833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Asset6/pseuds/The_Asset6
Summary: Lip had never minded keeping his brother’s secrets before. So what if he had to add a few of Mickey’s?For Gallavich Week 2020, Day 2
Relationships: Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich, Lip Gallagher & Mickey Milkovich
Comments: 28
Kudos: 254





	Lips Sealed

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe this is my fourth Shameless fic. It's a bit of a ficlet, but my submission for the final day will be much longer. Happy Gallavich week!

“Fuck it,” sighed Lip, closing his textbook and rolling his eyes towards the ceiling.

This wasn’t going to work. Not right now. He didn’t have the patience or the energy to sit up all night doing his homework when everything was falling to pieces around him. Yeah, it could be a lot worse. Liam was home from the hospital and seemed to be doing okay, but the rest of his family? Frank was dying. Sammi and her kid had moved in and were enabling him. Fiona was a wreck. Ian wasn’t missing anymore yet remained a mystery that Lip had planned to solve before the world had gone to hell. Debbie was trying to grow up too fast. Carl was…Carl. How the fuck was he supposed to make college his utmost priority like everybody insisted when _that_ was the shit happening at home?

A clue: he couldn’t.

So, Lip wasn’t even going to bother for the time being. Anything he wrote would probably turn out to be garbage anyway. If he was lucky, maybe a few of his professors would take pity on a piece of ghetto trash like him and offer an extension. It couldn’t hurt to try, at the very least.

For now, he slid his school shit across the table and pulled out his phone to text Mandy. It was probably a real dick move to ask for a favor after…well, everything. Desperation would do that to a guy, though, and when it came to Ian? Suffice it to say that he’d left that stone unturned a little too long if what he and Debbie had found at that gay club in Boystown was as big a red flag as it seemed.

The fact that it was nearly three in the morning would have been a deterrent any other day, but at this point, time didn’t mean a whole lot. In high school, he would have said it was a useless societal construct designed by the powers that be to regulate their lives or something along those lines. Part of him was still arrogant enough to believe that. Much as Lip hated to admit it, however, adulthood was kind of slapping him in the face pretty hard these days, and that chip he used to wear pompously on his shoulder had gotten dislodged on the L somewhere between home and the university. Some shit, he simply wasn’t too proud to do anymore.

So, it was pure necessity and a bit of guilt at having waited four months to attempt to find his baby brother that had him sending the message anyway, short and simple: “ _Did you get ahold of Ian?”_

Ten minutes passed with no answer, and Lip scrubbed his hands wearily over his face. Mandy had to be either working or sleeping, though he had a feeling she would have found a second to get back to him if it were the former.

_Guess we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way._

After a quick trip upstairs to make sure everyone was asleep and still breathing, Lip was jogging down the sidewalk, his coat pulled tight around him. It was fucking cold out here, even by Chicago’s general standards for April. His breath condensed into a white fog, and the residual winter snow stuck to his shoes so that he slid a bit when he crossed the street in front of the familiar brick shithole Mandy called home. It was probably a good thing Terry had been dragged off to prison again a couple days ago, because Lip was fairly certain that he wouldn’t have taken kindly to him pounding on the door at that hour of the night. Morning. Whatever they wanted to call it.

But he did. And nobody answered.

“Shit…”

“The fuck you doing here, Gallagher?”

Lip whirled around, frowning down at where Mickey was climbing out of the backseat of an SUV that he hadn’t heard approach. “Uh, looking for Mandy.”

“She ain’t here. Working,” he added over his shoulder as he made his way to the tailgate and dug around inside. Knowing his family, Lip figured there had to be drugs or guns or something equally illegal in there. Maybe somebody they were going to dump in the river? The Milkoviches never ceased to amaze him, after all, so he didn’t put much past them.

“Okay. Well, do you…” Lip trailed off. This was the second time in a week that he had to rely on Mickey for information, and it irked him more than slightly given that his gut was telling him Mickey was somehow involved in Ian’s sudden decision to ditch town.

_Just find out what he knows and then get the hell out of here._

“I asked her to get a message to Ian for me. She say if she did or not?”

For a guy who’d been sleeping with Lip’s brother for two years and actually seemed to give a damn when he came by the other day, Mickey sounded casual as fuck when he replied, “Nope. Couldn’t find him.”

Fucking great. That was all he needed was for Ian to disappear again. He knew he should’ve dragged his ass out of that club when he had the chance, bouncers be damned.

“Yo, heads up.”

“Wha—hey!”

It was a near miss, but Lip managed to catch the bag Mickey chucked right at his fucking face before it took out one of his eyes. And that was good, because if they were missing, then they couldn’t have bugged out of his head when he turned the olive drab duffel over in his hands and spied a familiar name along the side.

“This is Ian’s.”

“Yeah, no shit. Mandy gave me the address,” grunted Mickey, now hauling something that looked pretty damn heavy out of the backseat. Something with bright red hair, pale skin, and no sense of self-preservation if his lack of a coat in this weather was indicative.

There were likely some very tactful methods of addressing the sight of Mickey Milkovich lugging Ian over his shoulder like a fucking caveman. Unfortunately, it had been a really long day, so the best Lip could do was, “What the fuck, Mickey?!”

“You gonna open the goddamn door or just fucking stand there, shithead?”

What Ian saw in him, Lip would never understand.

Or so he thought.

If he was being honest, Lip didn’t actually know a whole lot about Mickey besides what Ian had told him and the rumors that traveled all over the South Side about his family. The two were impressively dissimilar. Where most of the neighborhood would cross to the other side of the street as soon as look at him, Ian’s descriptions were more befitting a chihuahua: loud, obnoxious, violent, yet ultimately a ball of fluff deep down. But Ian was naïve as hell and didn’t see the harm in sleeping with guys two and three times his age, so excuse Lip for not exactly trusting his judgment, especially when most of his own interactions with Mickey hadn’t ended on the best of terms.

The guy who patiently carried Ian up the front steps instead of shoving him into Lip’s arms? Who carefully navigated the cluttered mess that was his front hall, double and triple checking that his burden’s shoulder wasn’t going to smack into anything? That wasn’t the Mickey Milkovich that Lip was acquainted with. Neither was the Mickey who threw open the door to his bedroom as though he didn’t care yet lowered Ian gently onto his bed, cradling the back of his head in one hand while the other adjusted his arm to lay over his stomach rather than dangle over the edge of the mattress.

No, Lip didn’t know _this_ Mickey at all and simply stood gaping in the doorway. How else was he supposed to react? This shit just didn’t happen.

_Mickey fucking Milkovich_ was kneeling on the floor, unlacing Ian’s sneakers, and slipping them off his feet one at a time. He was adjusting Ian’s legs into a more comfortable, less awkward position. He was pulling the fucking covers up to his chin and sitting beside him, stiff as a board but not attempting to move away just yet.

This was a different Mickey Milkovich.

This was _Ian’s_ Mickey. The secret Mickey that nobody witnessed except for him.

And now Lip, apparently.

“I didn’t fucking knock him out, if that’s what you were thinking.”

Lip blinked. Even though he had literally just tucked Ian into bed as if he were a toddler, Mickey sounded as rude as ever, half-turned away so that his face was partially obscured from where Lip stood. He supposed he could let it slide for once, however. His curiosity was gnawing at him too deeply to pick a fight.

Depositing his brother’s bag beside Ian’s shoes, Lip jokingly replied, “Wouldn’t have surprised me if you did. Kinda felt like doing it myself.”

Mickey’s mouth curled upwards, but it didn’t look happy. “Always gotta clean up after you Gallaghers.”

_Excuse me?_

“If you didn’t kick his ass, you mind telling me what _did_ happen?” Maybe then Lip would have an easier time keeping that filter he’d constructed during the first half of the semester intact a bit longer.

…Who was he kidding? This was Mickey Milkovich.

“Found him all coked out at some queer bar,” he explained with a shrug as though it didn’t bother him in the slightest. His words and the tight lines around his eyes betrayed him when he continued, “It was either let some fat old faggot take him home, leave him passed out in the goddamn snow, or bring him here. Figured he was less likely to end up dead in a ditch coming with me.”

“Why didn’t you bring him to the house?”

“You got any fucking idea what time it is, College?”

_Touché._

Lip got the distinct impression that that wasn’t the only reason Mickey had chosen to bring Ian here rather than his home, but he bit his tongue against pointing that out. It _was_ late, and the last thing he needed was to wake up the whole house trying to get Ian inside where he belonged. That didn’t mean he felt entirely comfortable about leaving Ian _here_ for what little remained of the night, but since Mickey was hovering over him like some kind of rain cloud (or guardian angel, though the connotation was sort of funny when applied to him), it looked like he didn’t have much choice. Which left them with only one problem.

“Your _wife_ gonna be okay with him sleeping in your bed?”

It came out a bit blunter than he had been aiming for. It was too damn late (or early) to care about niceties, though. Plus, he still needed time to process the fact that _two_ of his brothers had gotten into some powder that could fry their brains instead of one.

Surprisingly, and totally in keeping with the truce-flavored theme of the night, Mickey didn’t give him shit for it. A grimace passed over his face, but it vanished so quickly that Lip thought he might have imagined it.

“Does it look like I give a shit?” he groused, his evasion answering the question for him.

“Not really.”

Huffing, Mickey waved a hand as if to say, _“Well, there you have it.”_ And if that wasn’t an obvious dismissal, Lip didn’t know what more he could have done to make it clearer.

He hadn’t quite reached the door, however, when Mickey spoke again.

“Fucking Frank tell you?”

Lip didn’t need to ask what he meant by that and incredulously retorted, “ _Frank_ knows about you two?”

“ _No_ , just—” Mickey ran a thumb over his eyebrow, effectively hiding his expression even though the stress seemed to roll off him in waves. “Ian?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Jesus Christ…”

“I’m his brother. He sorta tells me everything, Mickey.”

“ _Everything_ , huh?”

A part of him wanted to argue. The rest couldn’t find the words. When they were kids? Yeah, Ian had come to him all the time. They’d wait until Carl fell asleep and Fiona turned out the light in her room, then sat up talking about the dumbest shit. Ian was an open book then. No covertly running off before the rest of them woke up and vanishing for four months. No surreptitiously getting caught and pummeled by Terry Milkovich for fucking his son.

No secretly falling in love with Mickey and only accidentally letting that bomb drop at the guy’s _wedding_.

“I… I guess not,” admitted Lip.

Mickey grunted and then fell silent, his gaze turning once again to where Ian was calmly unconscious beneath the covers.

Ever since his brother up and disappeared, Lip couldn’t say that he’d felt a great deal of sympathy for Mickey Milkovich. As far as he was concerned, the guy was a royal asshole. He’d led Ian on for a couple years, slept around with other people under Ian’s nose and in front of his face, and made him feel like shit for wanting stuff that he could never have. (That was another secret, but there were some things Ian didn’t _have_ to say in order for him to hear them.) He’d dropped out of school for far less noble reasons than Lip had intended to, if he had any reason whatsoever. He beat people up for the hell of it. He fag-bashed to hide who and what he was.

But Mickey had secrets. Same as Ian.

The fingers that had balled into fists and socked Lip in the jaw gingerly brushed a few wayward strands of Ian’s hair out of his face. The muscles he’d built up during his juvie days had brought Lip’s brother home safely. The eyes that exuded nothing but cold malice around most people softened exponentially, keeping careful watch as Ian’s chest rose and fell steadily despite the drugs in his system.

Ian’s secret was that he was in love with Mickey. Well, it sure seemed like Mickey’s was that _he_ was in love with _Ian_.

Lip didn’t need his high school diploma to tell him that.

Sure, he was still pissed off at him deep beneath the surface. It rankled that he apparently believed he had the right to touch Ian at all when the connection between his wedding and Ian’s departure was so palpable that Lip could cut it with a knife. Tomorrow, they would go right back to normal and avoid each other like the plague unless interacting was absolutely necessary.

Tonight, he was just grateful to have been allowed into the walls of iron and barbs that Mickey—that _all_ the Milkoviches built around themselves, even for an instant. It didn’t help, but it made the decision to leave Ian in his care feel a little less like neglect. It made the words taste a bit less bitter when he offered, “You know, you don’t have to worry, Mickey. Your secret’s safe with me.”

And if the guy his brother loved happened to stare in stunned disbelief as Lip walked out the door? Well, his lips were sealed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> For more of Shameless, my writing, and assorted fandom madness, I'm on [Tumblr](https://pathoftheranger.tumblr.com)!


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